To Fill the Church with Wonder

In the mornings I pray.

I like it best an hour or two before dawn. I get up and make coffee then slip out of the front door to walk the streets of my neighborhood and pray in the darkness.

Summers are stifling. When I leave the air-conditioned comfort of my home I feel like I’m stepping into a sauna. Fall on the other hand is glorious. Breezes rustle in the dying leaves, and the moon hangs on the horizon like a jewel.

Spring, I walk in a wonderland. Owls hoot to one other down the hill from my house. The first songs of frogs erupt from the hedges. A bob white hides in my neighbor’s backyard and whispers a shy note as I move past. It’s a chorus out there, a symphony of praise.

But the season I love most is winter. There’s a crystalline stillness in the air that makes praying easier than at any other time of year. In January Orion climbs the southern sky like an archangel.

Of all the mornings I’ve walked and prayed, one stands out. I don’t remember what month it was—maybe October when strange things happen because of the vagaries of temperature and humidity. You’re apt to run into anything that time of year.

I turned out of my driveway and looked up just in time to witness a wonder. Across a sky spangled with stars a great cloud bank rolled by, filling a third of the heavens. It emerged from the west and moved over my head into the east, travelling neither fast nor slow. There was a deliberate pace to its progress, a stateliness. But what took my breath away was how the cloud seemed to glow from the inside, revealing its inner contours even in the darkness.

My mind told me the unusual lighting effect was achieved through water droplets reflecting ground light, magnified by the season’s peculiar atmospheric conditions.

My heart, though, responded differently. I was transfixed by the scene, lost in the moment. The still, cold air. The silence more eloquent than any sound. The cloud sailing across the heavens carrying a secret flame. Only a divine power could shape such beauty in the night.

I felt like Jacob waking from his dream of angels. “How awesome is this place!” he said, “This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:17). Or like Jacob’s modern interpreter, priest and scientist Teilhard de Chardin:

By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers. As Jacob said…this palpable world…is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus.

Most mornings aren’t like that. Many are just the opposite. I walk out the door, holding onto my coffee cup like a drowning man clinging to a life preserver. And for the next half hour or so I pray, or try to.

I walk around the neighborhood in my pajama bottoms and flip flops, wearing a Tee shirt in the summer and a ratty sweatshirt in cold weather. I sing, quote Psalms, grieve, praise, lift my hands, weep, question, plead, argue, confess, plan, get distracted, wander in my thinking, apologize, talk out loud, laugh and in general get as honest with God as I know how.

My wife once told me that our neighborhood Facebook page had put out an alert for a strange man walking the streets in the middle of the night. Everyone needed to be on the lookout, it said. She posted a reply that the man was in fact her husband the preacher and didn’t pose any danger. As far as she knew.

My prayers are nowhere near what they ought to be. I’m often tired, angry or bored and whatever degree of spiritual sensitivity I manage to stir up within my own heart falls far short of what I wish was there. I’m afraid that my messy, mystical, neo-charismatic, sometimes liturgical, frequently mundane and often incoherent style of praying would be a grave disappointment to many of my church members who think their pastor ought to have his act together better than I do. Still, I pray. I know of no other way to pastor, no other way to live.

I can’t explain wonder—what it is, where it comes from or why it shows up when it does. What I do know is that in the modern world where wonder has been left for dead, prayer has a way of bringing it back to life. Prayer and wonder are linked in the human spirit in ways that aren’t easy to explain but impossible to ignore. To do the one opens the door to the other.

Nowhere in the Bible is the intersection between prayer and wonder so clear as in the opening chapters of the book of Acts.

The first chapter shows the resurrected Jesus preparing the disciples for the arrival of the Holy Spirit:

“Wait for the promise of the Father…You will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” (Acts 1:4-5)

Prayer often is waiting. Waiting to hear from God. Waiting to be empowered by God. Waiting to see God at work. In contrast to the hyper-active religious environment we live in today, the earliest church was focused not on activity but on prayer.

The second chapter reveals the result of the disciples’ waiting and praying.

And when the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. (Acts 2:1-3)

A few verses later, the new Christian community is marked by the presence of God in ways the people would never have imagined:

And they devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. (Acts 2:42-43)

The church goes through its first crisis in chapter six with a dispute between the native Jewish population and the Jews from other countries. The specific problem has to do with the daily meals served to needy widows. The widows native to Israel are being served while those from outside of Israel are being ignored. It sounds petty but the truth is that whenever racism breaks out on any level, the church is threatened.

The apostles step into the situation in remarkable fashion. Let the congregation appoint a team, they say, with the authority to resolve the problem. Our responsibilities are more important:

“It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables… But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” (Acts 6:2,4)

It’s strange to modern practices of church leadership to see congregational conflict resolved by nothing more than prayer and the ministry of the word. But the results speak for themselves:

And the word of God continued to increase, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith. (Acts 6:7)

According to the book of Acts, the church is birthed in wonder. The people’s prayers, the apostles’ teaching, the conversions, the spiritual communion with one another, the miracles. For the early believers, prayer and wonder go hand in hand.

How else could it be? Where God shows up, past experience and future expectations alike fall by the wayside. God does more than we can imagine. We live in pedestrian churches, many of us, and our congregational life revolves more around a predictable schedule of religious observances than in a personal experience of the divine. But if God is among us, shouldn’t there be wonder?

For my part, I’ve given instructions to my wife that if I ever develop a life-threatening condition, she’s not to call a professional preacher to pray over me. Instead, I want her to track down some older Pentecostal woman who fears God but nothing else. A woman who will make a scene in my hospital room, weeping, raising her hands, stalking my sick bed like a prophet and pleading with God to come down and personally fix whatever it is that’s killing me. I want someone who lives in wonder and when they pray, knows that heaven will respond.